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You simply cannot love every single book you pick up and you also don’t jive with every recommendation from a friend. Sometimes, that 4.0 or above rating on Goodreads is meaningless and you wonder Why? Who? How? Why? Being disappointed by a book is honestly horrible time wasted. For a list of reads I do not recommend and why (anything I rated three stars and below) read on.
1. P.S. I Love You by Cecelia Ahren (2 stars)
If you loved the movie, don’t expect to love the book in the same way. The NY Times best selling story about a man who pre-writes his wife letters before dying only brought tears of boredom to my eyes. While the movie is my favorite PMS movie, the book is more like PMS symptoms… a real drag. I promise I went into it quite aware this was nothing like the movie and with an open mind and clean slate.. I still found myself only connecting with the characters on a surface level. The story dragged on and on -- every time I checked to see how much more I had left, I’d groan because it felt like more pages were tacked on! The thing is, I feel like the writing is really good. The story just didn’t hook me. It’s mostly about Holly’s (the main character) healing; but the story only gives her a year to grieve her husband’s death. So many people close to her make her feel like crap for grieving! I kept alternating between the questions “Why does this matter? Why do I care about this?” and “THIS DUDE SUCKS LET HER BE A BRAT AND GRIEVE!” An impressive debut but so hard to get through.
2. Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2.5 stars)
I wanted to love this so bad. Mexican history mixed with the God of Death? Sign me up! Unfortunately, the story dragged for me and the end was so not satisfying. I’ll try my best to explain without giving anything away. There was a lot I disliked about this book but I’ll start with the positives: The descriptive writing is beautiful; but it gets worse throughout the story. The plot is cool and I loved all of the characters, however the love story seemed so unnecessary to me. It could’ve just been a beautiful story about finding humanity, yet the ending sort of defeats the purpose to me because of the added love story. Plus, the historical information could have been written in so much better. It was choppy and read like a textbook and felt random. It didn’t flow well into the storyline. However, a friend of mine loved the love story and gave this a winning 5 stars, so this could have just been me.
3. Sea Witch by Sarah Henning (3 stars)
So… this book is… silly. It’s a prequel to Ursala from The Little Mermaid. The writing tries so hard to be dark, but isn’t. It sounds like someone who’s trying to tell a dark story but just can’t reach that deep. I know, I know. That’s so mean! I hate being so blunt about an author's work, but that’s just how I felt. Everyone in this book gets mad about everything. Someone says “Hi” innocently and the other person twists their face in a snarl and screams. I’m not exaggerating! Like, I had a dream while reading this where I was literally asking my mom why everyone was so mad in the book I was reading. That’s how much it concerned and confused my psyche. It’s pretty sad too, because the ideas in this book were unique and cool. But the writer seemed to just create characters to play with at her disposal, having them behave inconsistently as it went with her storyline. Also, I encourage you to count how many times a fire or shore “licks” something. (A lot. Like every other page). I did enjoy reading this though, in a guilty pleasure sort of way.
4. The Queen of Nothing by Holly Black (2.5 to 3 stars)
I want to insert sooo many red, angry emojis here. The Queen of Nothing is the third and final book in The Folk of the Air series about a mortal living in trickster Faeryland. The previous books, The Cruel Prince and The Wicked King were dark and untrustworthy. Holly Black created exciting political controversies and fought against typical fairytale stereotypes. She came up with shocking twists and turns and I finished her first two books in this series in one sitting. The leading lady in this series is a warrior on a mission who stays up every night giving herself poison so she can be immune to it. She’s no damsel in distress. So, you can imagine my utter disappointment when the third book is a happy romance where everyone just smiles and nothing bad happens. If I could just use emojis for this book it would be full of heart eyes and there should be a few smirks and knives thrown in there. Ugh. The inconsistencies. It felt like a different author wrote the book entirely. I was yawning the entire time and itching for it to be over with. Talk about P.S. I Love You 2.0.
5. Stalking Jack the Ripper by Kerri Maniscalco (2 stars)
Finally, a huge letdown masquerading as an empowering, feminist mystery. This is a historical fiction about, you guessed it, the infamous and unresolved real mystery of Jack the Ripper. I knew who the killer was the second I was introduced to them as a reader. This was no mystery. Not to mention, the leading lady sticks her nose up at other woman who’s feminine and prances around like she’s the smartest and most capable while at the same time being an idiot. I’m serious; she doesn’t do anything to figure out the mystery on her own. Then, when the mystery is figured out, she doesn’t do anything about the killer! And, she’s always accusing the men in her life of being overbearing because they don’t let her go out alone at night while a serial murderer is on the loose looking for women to kill. On top of all that, she’s constantly reminding herself to bury her emotions because emotions block her logic and are a woman’s weakness. Big. Yikes. I mean, maybe I’m in the wrong here, but none of this sounds like an empowering feminist story to me.
Ultimately, it takes a lot for me to give any book under three stars because I think writing then publishing a book is an amazing feat to begin with. Despite the brutality of my mini reviews here, I do have a lot of respect for authors… I just did not enjoy any of the above books.
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